The Correlation between Emotional Intelligence and Academic Listening Skills of Pre-Service Teachers

In the present study, emotional intelligence and academic listening skill levels of pre-service teachers and the correlations between these variables were determined. Furthermore, the emotional intelligence levels and academic listening competencies of pre-service teachers were also investigated based on the variables of gender, department, and the preference of the department of study. The study group included 361 freshmen pre-service teachers attending the Faculty of Education and the study was conducted with survey method, a quantitative research method. The study data were collected with the “Academic Listening Skill Competency Scale” and “Rotterdam Emotional Intelligence Scale”. In the study, the regression analysis was conducted to determine the causality between emotional intelligence scores and academic listening skill scores revealed significant findings. The study findings demonstrated that “Total Emotional Intelligence” scores of the students reflected above average emotional intelligence levels. It was determined that the academic listening skill competency scores of the pre-service teachers were above average in both scale sub-dimensions and the total scale score. The results of regression analysis showed that the causality between Total Emotional Intelligence and Total Academic Listening Skills was significant.

Measuring University Students’ Perceptions and Attitudes toward Sudden Transition to Online Learning and Academic Self- Efficacy

Online learning has unquestionably shaped contemporary education. The emergence and spread in recent months of the COVID-19 virus, with the attendant preventative implementation of social distancing, has significantly enhanced online learning’s influence. In the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, where strict social distancing precautions were implemented early in the pandemic, thousands of college students were rapidly shifted from conventional to online instructional environments. Now that these students have a semester of experience with online learning, the time is propitious to explore these students’ online learning experiences. One concept in connection with which students’ online learning experiences have not been extensively studied is that of academic self-efficacy. The present study seeks to investigate Jeddah University students’ experiences with online learning in light of their assessments of their academic self-efficacy. Employing a combined descriptive/correlational research design organized around a pair of survey instruments—one designed to query students’ online learning experiences and a second designed to measure their senses of their academic self-efficacy—the present study investigates attitudes of a population of 1,167 Jeddah University undergraduate students randomly selected from the available pool of 16,893 individuals. The study finds that student attitudes with respect to both online learning and self-efficacy are high. It shows, furthermore, significant statistical correlation between students’ highly positive experiences with online instruction and their high senses of their academic self-efficacy. By developing the understanding regarding student attitudes and self-efficacy, this research opens avenues for further research into the connections between online learning and students’ self-perceptions. Moreover, the study’s findings hold significant implications for bettering Saudi Arabian e-learning, an outcome fully in keeping with the policy goals outlined in the 2030 vision.

Opinions of Teacher Candidates on Inclusive Education: A Parallel Mixed Method Study

In this study, teacher candidates’ attitudes, self-efficacy perceptions towards inclusive education, and their situation towards in-class practices were determined. A total of a hundred thirty three pre-service teachers participated in the research voluntarily. The study was designed according to the parallel mixed methods research in which both quantitative and qualitative data (QUAN + QUAL) were used together. As data collection tools, “Attitude Scale towards Inclusive Education”, “Self-Efficacy Scale for Inclusive Education” and “In-class Practice Scale for Inclusive Education” were used. In addition, during the collection of qualitative data, teacher candidates were asked to complete the statement, “In my opinion, inclusive education is like…. because….” To determine their metaphorical perceptions. When the results of the study were examined, teacher candidates, it was determined that the perceptions of self-efficacy towards inclusive education and the concern for personal equipment differ in terms of various variables. In addition, the participants chose the positive metaphors that they produced for inclusive education. Among these metaphors, respect for differences, acceptance of diversity is expressed as coexistence due to the structure of inclusive education that unites society.

Ethnocentrism, Theoretical Awareness, and Intellectual Resistance in University Students’ Reading Behaviour

This paper discusses the insightful and illuminating findings of teaching critical reading within the theoretical framework of critical pedagogy. More specifically, this paper examines the impact of a critical-reading course on students’ reading skills and beliefs about discourse production and interpretation. The course was conducted according to the principles of transformative participatory action research and, thus, a corpus of 50 essays, written by a convenience sample of 25 post-graduate students in the pre-test and post-test phases, was analyzed to examine the effect of the course on students’ reading-habits and their representations of different discourses. Pretest findings showed that most students used to think that discourses are innocent and ideology-free and that reading a text consists in understanding its general idea, extracting its writer’s viewpoint, making sense of its vocabulary, and paraphrasing it. As far as text’s function is concerned, most students used to believe that a text’s basic function is delivering information. In addition, most of them were unaware of the fact that a text has ideological and socio-political functions. Post-test findings revealed that students’ discourse awareness and reading habits have become more critical and developed at two levels: the worldview level and the meta-language level. The t-test statistics suggest that there is a significant difference of p˂.001 between students’ reading scores before and after the intervention. Therefore, the null hypothesis which says that there is no significant difference between studying critical reading from a critical pedagogy perspective and studying it from a functional or conventional perspective is false.

Media as a Learning-Teaching Tool in the Context of Media Literacy from Turkish Language Teacher Candidates’ Perspective

This study aims to reveal the Turkish language teacher candidates’ opinions about the media as a learning-teaching tool in the context of media literacy. It has been conducted utilising the basic qualitative research pattern, one of the qualitative research types, with twenty participating teacher candidates studying in the last year of their university education. In the study, a semi-structured interview form is employed as the data collection tool. The collected data are analysed based on the content analysis method, one of the qualitative analysis methods. The results obtained in the study have shown that social media has a central place in Turkish teacher candidates’ media perception; when they were asked about the media tools for teaching, they answered the internet and YouTube primarily. The participants stressed that the media as a teaching tool offers teachers alternative ways and facilitates the educational process. For these reasons, they consider the media a usable teaching tool. The media tools they use the most in their own learning processes are the internet, YouTube and Instagram. The teacher candidates plan to use media tools while performing their jobs. Moreover, the teacher candidates, who consider utilising media tools in the learning-teaching process necessary, plan to advise their students to learn through media.

Fourth Grade Primary School Students’ Critical Writing Skill Levels

In this study, it was aimed to determine the critical writing skill levels of fourth grade Primary School students. This study is a quantitative research and was designed in a scanning pattern. The study group of the research consists of 175 students attending in the fourth grade of three different Primary Schools, which were determined by the purposive sampling method, by taking into account their gender and socioeconomic status. The research data were obtained as a result of the evaluation of the critical writings written by the students in the study group with using the critical writing rubric. The obtained data were presented as descriptive statistics (frequency, min. and max. values, arithmetic mean, standard deviation) with the help of statistical program, and analyzed with independent samples t-test and one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA). As a result of the research, it was determined that the students’ scores on critical writing skills were generally at a low level. In general, students are insufficient in the dimensions of planning, presenting evidence and persuading, questioning, and multidimensional thinking of critical writing; fluency and clarity and shape/form dimensions were found to be sufficient. In addition, it was determined that student achievements differed significantly according to socioeconomic level (in favor of high socioeconomic level) and gender (in favor of female students).

The Scenes of Violence in a Digital Writing Environment: The Sample of Wattpad

The social and technological developments experienced have led the 21st century children to digital tools for education, entertainment and communication. The concepts of literacy were also affected by this tendency, and with the spread of extracurricular reading and writing activities, students’ literacy tendencies rapidly began to evolve from paper to screen. The Wattpad is also a text writing and sharing application that children and young people engagedly turn to. In this uncontrolled free platform, thousands of stories written in various forms of expressions on all kinds of subjects are presented to the admiration of children in the developmental age and are quickly consumed by many children and young people who are not yet digitally literate. In this qualitative research, which is designed as a case study, 6 stories that were awarded in 2018 within the scope of the Wattys Awards given by Wattpad each year with user votes were examined within the framework of the concept of violence. The data were obtained through document analysis and they were analyzed with the descriptive analysis method according to Polat’s (2016) classification of “physical violence, sexual violence, emotional violence, economic violence and cyber violence” and analyzed according to the determined codes and categories. The findings show that there are many elements of violence in the stories examined and that these mainly include physical and emotional violence types. The acts of “killing” and “dying” in the physical violence, and the insults aimed at disdaining and ridiculing were the most common forms of emotional violence. The fact that these stories, in which all kinds of violence were encountered, were deemed worthy of awards by the readers, revealed that readers had an interest in violent genres, and Wattpad fed this interest of young readers. For this reason, it is recommended that Wattpad application be used under the family supervision and an editorial application be implemented within Wattpad itself.

A General Perspective on the Use of Conjunctions Across Arab Students as Turkish Language Learners

The present study aims to submit a general perspective to the conjunctions which Arab students whose language levels were B1 and B2 have structured in their written texts. To this end, this research was designed as a document analysis. In the study, the documents were obtained from free writings by 90 Arab students who were studying at Bolu Branch of TÖMER, Turkey. In order to analyse the conjunctions used by the study group in their written texts, frequency and percentage analyses were employed in quantitative findings obtained through this analysis. Additionally, Mann-Whitney U test was used to compare students’ use of conjunctions according to their language levels. The results of the study have indicated that the most commonly used conjunctions by Arab students whose language levels were B1 and B2 were additive, causal, adversative and time; on the contrary, the least commonly used conjunctions were coordinating, expository, exemplificatory and conditional. The general perspectives on the use of conjunctions across Arab students whose language levels were B2 were found to be higher in their written texts compared to those whose language levels were B1. Consequently, it was revealed that Arab students whose language levels were B2 used ‘adversative, conditional and exemplificatory conjunctions’ to a greater extent; contrary to this, it was found that they were not able to progress in the remaining five conjunctions. According to the findings of the study, teaching of the conjunctions used less commonly by Arab students should be focused more to enable them to comprehend what they read and to convey their ideas in written expression more proficiently.

Problems Experienced by Prospective Turkish Teachers in Paragraph Development Process

It is observed that individuals have problems in written expression in the Turkish education system, and a permanent solution can not be developed to solve these problems. Therefore, the primary objective of this research is to determine the problems of prospective Turkish teachers in paragraph creation. This research was carried out in the descriptive survey model. The study group consists of 88 students studying in the 3rd grade at Hatay Mustafa Kemal University in the 2018-2019 academic year. In the data collection process, the “paragraph creation problem inventory” developed by the researchers was used in the study. According to research results, it was found that the students suffered the most in “inability to create an introductory paragraph” (n=86), “inability to maintain the thought unity in the paragraph” (n=84), and “inability to develop thought in the paragraph” (n=83). In this study, solutions to the problems experienced by the students were also presented. The study findings are expected to contribute to teaching paragraph development.

Researching Identity in Language Teachers – Current Challenges and Implications

Language teacher identity has been at the forefront of pedagogical research in recent years; this has become particularly important due to the demographic changes seen throughout the world since 2015; since then, there have been significant changes in the cultural landscape of schools in general and language teaching in particular, which presents unique challenges for teachers in their process of identity construction. This study aims to explore the transformative nature of language teacher identity in two settings: teaching in online classrooms in one’s home country, and teaching in online classroom abroad. The research will explore how cultural identity shapes an educators’ relationship with students, how one’s own cultural identity influences methodological and pedagogical choices, how these can improve literacy in the young adult classroom, as well touching upon the relevance of cultural identity is in a developing teacher. The findings revealed a general consensus on the need to gear pedagogigcal practices towards a student-centered approach; they further showed a general split in how teachers view the role that cultural identity plays in the classroom: while some felt that local cultures hindered their approach to teaching, others felt it helped build rapport and understanding between teachers and learners.